25 November 2012, 12:44 PM IST
Two terror accused who have languished in jail for 16 years have been acquitted by the Delhi High Court. A group of teachers at Jamia Milia Islamia had brought out a report in September that listed 16 people whom the Delhi police had arrested for terror and put behind bars, only to release them later after the courts acquitted them.
All these are young Muslim men, many of them from Kashmir. Delhi is not alone when it comes to putting young lives, ever so slowly, through the wringer of the law enforcement machinery.
Terrorists have struck in many parts of India. In all those places, the police have caught the perpetrators, their associates and conspirators, most of whom confess to their sins, persuaded by the tender loving care they are administered. They spend years in jail, some are acquitted by the trial court itself, some others by higher courts.
A few are convicted and, even after a protracted processof appeal, some of these convictions stand. But some of the founding convictions of the Republic fall in the process, felling many things they uphold.
India is supposed to be a liberal democracy, whose Constitution guarantees citizens certain fundamental rights. When the police themselves flout these rights with apparent abandon, the Constitution stands undermined, our democracy turns illiberal. The issue goes beyond abstract principles and the tragedy of maimed individual lives.
India is not a homogeneous country. It is a union of multiple identities— of language, religion, region, caste, ethnicity. Each one of these multiple identities is an articulation of the richness and variety of humankind's evolution on this planet.
A pre-requisite for India's unity as a nation is shared confidence among members of any and every one of the groups constituting these different identities that they can live with dignity and security and prosper, within a shared framework of rights and duties, mediated by a state that does not discriminate against anyone.
That confidence is sabotaged, whenever the police carry out wilful wrong arrests, kill people in so-called encounters and oppress members of minority communities.
The police might engage in such behaviour because of communal bias or, often enough, sheer expedience — they are under pressure to apprehend the perpetrators of some heinous crime against society and, to save their own skins, pick up convenient victims and frame charges against them.
This might seem sweeping and unfair to the police, an under-staffed, underpaid and overworked body of public servants whose vigilance and action are still summoned to protect the citizens from all threats to normalcy. But the fact remains that the police have failed, dismally, to change their culture from when the British set up the force to subjugate the subjects of an unruly colony.
They have to evolve into an agency that serves citizens and are accountable to them and not just to their own internal hierarchy.The police will not do it out of the goodness of their hearts. It is the job of politics to make them.
Political failure on this crucial count mutilates young, promising lives and creates alienation and schism, instead of unity in diversity. This must stop.
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